On a forum I belong to we were discussing the benefits of self-hosted vs free-hosted blogs, in this case with WordPress. One of the members was worried she might lose the increased readership she’s been getting over the past few months if she made a move now. And the reason why a move was being discussed was because another member had highlighted that free-hosted version of WordPress doesn’t take kindly to paid advertising and links being on their free supported sites. They are supposed to be non-commercial.  So, the information below gives an outline of the benefits of shifting to paid hosting for WordPress blogs.

If your traffic is increasing then it’s all the more important that you have your site where you have control.  There are things you need to think about:

• On a free hosted site there are restrictions on what you can do and limited templates.
• On a free hosted site – who is backing up your blog?
• What happens if your blog disappears?
• Do you have that content backed up?
• I have heard of people on Blogger.com whose blogs disappeared and some of them were not recovered. I haven’t heard of that at WordPress but I don’t hang around the forums there.  Don’t want to scare you but I do want you to think about this and explore the options available to you. If there is a backup system there, then that won’t be something to worry about.

The reasons why I like to have control on a paid hosting site:

• I can use whatever templates I wish – I just have to research to find them and then upload them, and activate them.
• I can install any plugins I want to use.
• I can make any modifications I wish, including background colours, text, etc.
• I can place advertisements on my blogs without worrying about whether I’m allowed to or not.
• I use a domain name of my choosing without wordpress or blogspot in the address.  Domains that relate to your keywords help a great deal.
• I have a regular backup operating so backups are emailed to me weekly (there’s a plugin for this).

You can divert your free hosted blog to your self-hosted blog – I have done this with blogger. The reasons I do this are:

• So someone cannot take over my old address and use it for their spammy efforts
• So that existing audiences can still find me and update their address list
• So that audiences at the free site can still find me when surfing through blogs.

I first decided to do this with my VA blog about 3 or more years ago – it was a scary thing to do but I did it and am really glad because that blog now carries my main domain address and my audience has grown and my PR (Google page rank) as well.  I discovered that someone took over my old blogger address because I didn’t think about it in those days and they were selling stuff that had nothing to do with being a VA – lesson learnt.  These days when I test blogs on Blogger and then shift them, I make sure I add a message on the top post of the new address and there is a redirect code you can put in html which takes people to the new site in a few seconds. I haven’t tried that with WordPress free site but even if you can’t put the redirect code you could certainly leave a message to say you’ve shifted to a new home address.  And the import feature in WordPress does work quite well to shift old posts if you wish to do that.

I hope that the above information will also help you in your decision making if you have been considering a similar move – whether it be from Blogger or WordPress free hosted sites.